Beyond a Binary God: A Theology for Trans* Allies
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Read between March 19 - March 21, 2025
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As Christians, we do a great disservice to the trans* community if we make light of their passion for living into their God-given identities. I believe we need the trans* community represented in our churches, for their lives remind us about the complexity of human nature, a complexity that mirrors the nature of God, who, through creation, shows a delight in complexity.
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even Mother was a term applied to Jesus. However, by the time the controversy around artistic representations of Jesus was settled, Jesus was being portrayed as exclusively male, although sometimes as an androgynous- looking male.
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people, like all people, are part of God’s creation, which means, for me, a theology for trans* allies is a theology that takes seriously the fact that trans* people are part of God’s creation, sharing in the goodness that all creation shares. While trans* people may sin and not live up to God’s calling for them—as do all people—being trans* or transitioning is not a sinful act, but one that is
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We cannot leave unchallenged the traditional understandings of gender and gender roles, because of the danger they pose to some of God’s children.
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We cannot, and should not, try to pin God down or to box God in, for God is incapable of being either pinned down or boxed in.
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It also grounds all creation in the Name of Love, a Love that is powerful and glorious.
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What if the very idea of binaries is not a construct of God, but a construct of the human mind, an attempt to make a complex world “manageable”?
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Although we cannot, through our theology, completely undo the discrimination against the trans* community, we have a responsibility to rework our theology to remove it as a continuing support for such discrimination and to reinforce it as support and advocacy for trans* people; we must work to make amends for the damage that has been done to them by Christian communities.
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Human beings surely share in the diversity of creation; just as gender is not neatly divided into two separate, distinct, and immutable groups within the animal kingdom, the same seems to be true in the species homo sapiens, or human beings. We, like the rest of creation, share in God’s love of variety and diversity.
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To acknowledge that the trans* community is part of God’s creation is to acknowledge that our attempt to simplify humans into two and only two distinct and unchangeable genders no longer describes the full human experience.
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Those who challenge us to look at the complexity of human life are not problems to be solved, but gifts of a loving God to help us to grow into a deeper understanding of ourselves and our non-binary God.
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They remind us that human beings, made in the image and likeness of a God who cannot be fully comprehended by human beings, are also complex, mysterious, and beyond our attempts to simplify them